The ordained state seemed to represent for others two forms of certainty I did not possess. Moral certainty was the more embarrassing one to cope with. I hated being thought of as a moral policeman keeping an eye on humanity’s Ps and Qs. Part of this was embarrassment at the knowledge of my own weaknesses. Because I was a priest, it was assumed that I was a fully fashioned moral individual of steadfast and immovable rectitude. Maybe clergy ought to be like that. Incorruptible policemen. How could I explain that what attracted me to Jesus was his acceptance of those who saw themselves as failures rather than moral successes? There was a subversive tradition in Christianity that claimed it was sinners who got Jesus, people who couldn’t mind their Ps and Qs, not the righteous. It was the hopeless prodigal who understood, not his upright and disciplined big brother. Where to start trying to explain all that? But the dissonance went even deeper. It may have been fear of being found out myself, but I actually felt a strong revulsion against the morality-policing aspect of religion that was such a strong element in the Scottish tradition. I was attracted to the prophetic voice of faith that spoke against structural or institutional sin and the way the powerful ordered the world to suit themselves. I hated the prurient kind of religion that pried into personal weaknesses and took pleasure in exposing them. Yet, to the eyes of many, the ordained ministry was freighted with this reputation, which was why people felt they had to guard their reactions when they were around us. No wonder clergy sometimes fell into the trap of over-compensating for this misunderstanding by embarrassing demonstrations of their worldliness and humanity. The whole business was so tainted with false expectations that only the saintly seemed impervious to the treacherous currents that pulled us along. And I was no saint.
If moral expectations were the more painful projections to deal with, theological expectations were intellectually more frustrating to handle. The inner disconnect between the Church’s official theology and my own version of Christianity was one I did not fully comprehend at first. As a boy in the Vale, intoxicated by movies and the longings the hills had provoked in me, I had been propelled into religion in search of a great love to which I could give myself away. I was in pursuit of an object ever flying from desire, but I had stumbled into a complex institutional reality whose own relationship with that object was highly ambivalent. The ambivalence lay in the difference between the modes of pursuit and possession. The romantic is always in pursuit, while the realist wants to possess. All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than in the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place. This is particularly true of religious institutions. Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them. They segue from the ardour and uncertainty of seeking to the confidence and complacence of possession. They shift from poetry to packaging. Which is what people want. They don’t want to spend years wandering in the wilderness of doubt. They want the promised land of certainty, and religious realists are quick to provide it for them. The erection of infallible systems of belief is a well-understood device to still humanity’s fear of being lost in life’s dark wood without a compass. ‘Supreme conviction is a self-cure for infestation of doubts.’47 That is why David Hume noted that, while errors in philosophy were only ridiculous, errors in religion were dangerous. They were dangerous because when supreme conviction is threatened it turns nasty. There would be a time when I would land in that trap myself, but I wasn’t there yet. I was with Schweitzer and his escape from words to action. That is why I was moved by Lilias and Geoff. The romance of religion was alive in them – something greater than themselves was pulling them – but it was shown only in love and service. Whatever doubts they had about the claims of Christianity, the need to help the poor was self-evident to them. They were content to be social workers. So was I. Except now I was more than that. I had a church to run. That meant speaking. It meant preaching and teaching as well as action. It also meant opening myself to the projections of those who assumed I was morally and theological sorted, the way any good minister ought to be. Being in charge of a church suggested arrival rather than pursuit, the settler rather than the charismatic drifter.
But it wasn’t an immediate problem. There are many aspects of running a church, particularly one as unpretentious as Maggie Mungo’s, that are valuable on a purely human level. In the liberal tradition to which I belonged, the church was essentially a pastoral unit, a way of looking after people. However, there was a hidden tension, which was how you gathered the people in the first place in order to look after them. Liberals were better at the looking-after bit than at the gathering, which is why they tended to rely on congregations that had been collected by previous generations. It was Evangelicals who were the great gatherers. The trouble is, to be an effective gatherer you had to be excessive in your beliefs. It takes excessive certainty to convince others and override their doubts. Though liberal Catholics like me were no good at landing converts, we were quite good at keeping them on board once they’d been landed, because we were always living with our own doubts and were therefore reassuring to other doubters. ‘If they can stay around maybe I can stick it out as well,’ was their thinking. It wasn’t all high-octane doubt, anyway. Most people were struggling to get by. They liked the reassurance of a visit to their hospital bed when they were sick or a house call to remind them that they belonged to something bigger than themselves. They liked the way worship on Sundays linked them with something that had been going on for centuries, something they may only hazily have understood, but something that suggested that maybe there was a meaning to things, after all, that Something Cared. And they were joined a couple of times a year, at Christmas and Easter, by many others whose understanding of what was going on was even hazier than theirs. ‘But, you know, it just kind of feels right to come, though I’m a bit embarrassed by the impulse. Maybe it’s the hymns. You know, the memories they trigger. Who knows? Anyway, we always sit at the back – where we belong.’ Cough. Embarrassed laugh.
Apart from looking after the congregation, the church buildings were a resource for helping the neighbourhood. Maggie Mungo’s was a box of red brick with a decent hall at the back in which we ran lunch clubs for the elderly during the day and youth clubs for tearaways in the evening. Inside, the church was all treacly brown varnish and a clutter of unused choir stalls. With the help of a well-known local clan I changed all that the week Francis Moncreiff installed me as priest. Alec and Frances had twelve children. I got to know them through their boys, who came to my youth club and called me Doc, after Wyatt Earp’s sidekick who stood with him against the Younger clan at the gunfight in the OK corral. They would turn up at my door from time to time to hand in a bag of tinned food that ‘fell aff a lorry’. Alec and his two oldest boys were trained decorators and they offered to brighten up Maggie Mungo’s drab interior. Within five days the three of them had painted the walls a calm robin’s egg blue. I dumped the choir stalls and brought the altar away from the back wall into the middle of the sanctuary. The congregation turned up for my first Sunday to a transformed building. They liked it, but wondered: wasn’t there a rule that the diocesan authorities should be consulted about alterations to church fabric? There was. This time the bishop was more amused than exasperated. He informed me that the only other time he’d seen a church transformed with such rapidity was when the Cowley Fathers had taken one over in Edinburgh, and that they didn’t bother getting permission either.
Our services, though never crowded, were cheerful and we had lots of children. Jean was a trained singer, with a fine soprano voice. Lilias was good, too, and there were others who could hold a tune. There was too much ‘Kumbaya’ and ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’, but we deepened our repertoire by singing the psalms in a hot new version. Joseph Gelineau, a French Jesuit and composer, had translated the Hebrew psalms into French in 1953 and set them to music that wasn’t exactly plainsong b
ut was reminiscent of it. Cantors sang the verses of the psalm and the congregation responded with a simple antiphon after each verse. Jean and Lilias gave the chanting some class, and the children enjoyed belting out the response. So it was popular religion on Sunday and social work and campaigning during the week. As well as campaigning for better housing, we campaigned against the Bomb. We spent a lot of time on the back of lorries in George Square singing Pete Seeger’s songs, ‘If I Had A Hammer’ and ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ We always ended these rallies with a defiant rendering of the international protest anthem, ‘We Shall Overcome’. Glasgow had a great folk scene at the time, and CND rallies were the ideal excuse for an open-air concert. Jean, with her true voice, was a great asset here, and spent a lot of her young married life being lifted on and off lorries to help the group belt out the music. But following Jesus up and down Gorbals stairs, and on and off the back of lorries in George Square, was one thing; getting him out of the tomb where they had laid him after his crucifixion was another. One year, as Easter approached, I realised I wasn’t going to be able to pull it off this time. It was my first crisis.
I have already referred to the shift in Christian history from poetry to packaging. The journey, from a movement that tried to follow the example of Jesus to an institution that hardened round a particular interpretation of his meaning, took hundreds of years to complete. The theological shorthand for the shift is called the evolution from the Jesus of History to the Christ of Faith, the move from the man of Nazareth who challenged us to action against principalities and powers to the Godman of Christian orthodoxy who demands our belief. It is the reverse of the Schweitzer journey from word to act, from theology to service. In this doctrinal reversal word is paramount. The right word. Wrong words have to be punished because they threaten to erode the citadel of belief into which we have escaped from the cold winds of an empty universe.
Joan Bocher, otherwise called Joan of Kent, was burned for holding that Christ was not incarnate of the Virgin Mary, being condemned the year before but kept in hope of conversion; and the 30th of April the Bishop of London and the Bishop of Ely were to persuade her. But she withstood them and reviled the preacher that preached at her death.
That entry in the diary of King Edward VI for 2 May 1550 measures the distance the Church travelled away from Jesus and is still travelling today. The Christian test became words, the right words, the saving words. The biggest of these saving words is Resurrection, the word that captures the foundational belief of organised orthodox Christianity. And that Easter of my first crisis I could not put the Church’s meaning upon it. Yet I had to. I had to get into the pulpit of my little church and read the stories of how he had been killed and placed in a tomb. And how they had rolled a stone in front of the tomb. And how, three days later – though the accounts vary – his disciples had come to the tomb and found it empty. And how he had appeared to them over a period of forty days. And how at the end of the forty days they had seen him ascend – literally – into the sky towards heaven. And it was my duty to tell them that this story was true. And not in a poetic sense – I was good at that – but in a factual sense. I couldn’t do it.
By this time we had new friends across the street in 3 Abbotsford Place. John and Molly Harvey were at about the same stage in life as ourselves. Molly was a social worker, John was near the end of his studies at Glasgow University for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. It was to John I took my crisis: how can I find something honest to say about the Resurrection in three days’ time? We walked the streets of Gorbals thrashing out ideas, and then continued our discussions over a whisky or two in number 3.
We kicked around four ways of looking at the Resurrection before hitting on my get-out-of-gaol-free card. The toughest was the response David Hume would have given. Whatever the motives behind the stories, and no matter how sincere the storytellers were in believing them, we know that dead bodies do not resuscitate themselves. We also know that humanity is credulous and superstitious, and that history is full of bogus miracle stories. It is therefore more true to our experience of the world to conclude that the disciples were deluded than to believe the Resurrection actually happened.
The second approach was consistent with Hume’s scepticism while being sympathetic to the Christian tradition. It was true that bodies do not rise from the dead, but something happened to change the deserters of Good Friday into men of courage and conviction. For this school, the Resurrection was a psychic event in the lives of the followers of Jesus that was later given mythic form. One writer imagined Peter, a year after the crucifixion, back at his job as a fisherman, casting his net into the water and remembering the hope he had in Jesus. Suddenly, he is overwhelmed by the conviction that Jesus’s death was not a defeat, but the release into the world of his message of forgiveness and love. That turnaround was the Resurrection.
The third approach was even more sympathetic to the tradition. It could not understand where the stories came from, if there was nothing to them. The only evidence we have is the New Testament, and while there is clearly some embroidery and embellishing going on, there does seem to be a consistent holding to the story of the empty tomb and the series of appearances to the disciples. Anyway, if God can create a universe out of nothing, why can’t he raise Jesus from the nothingness of death into a new kind of being?
The fourth approach was not so much a resolution of this irresolvable argument as a way round it. Why not use the Schweitzer approach and move from word to action? Resurrection then becomes a symbol for the possibility of change and renewal at the personal and group level. Believing the Resurrection becomes a way of living not a way of speaking. Leave the words to be what they are to those who bother about them, and get on with changing the world.
That’s how I made it through what turned out to be a rehearsal for the main event. A few months later a bigger crisis hit. God himself went absent on me, though it would be more honest to say that a presence that often felt like an absence now became an absence that really was an absence. I was well aware that faith in God was not like one of these mutually supportive relationships we aspire to nowadays. I knew you could go for a long time in a relationship with God without getting any response from him at all. God was like those emotionally unavailable Scotsmen who were such a potent part of my heritage. He cared for me – he just wasn’t good at showing it. The big difference being, of course, that emotionally unavailable Scotsmen are physically all too available, as a general rule, so those on the receiving end of their inattentiveness are very conscious of their existence. Having an affair with God is a double deprivation, since he is neither emotionally nor physically available. It’s hard not to wonder how he got away with it for so long. It’s also hard for some of us to stop thinking about him, even if, like Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame, we are tempted to give up in disgust and say, ‘The bastard, he doesn’t exist.’
It’s no surprise that his absence haunts us. We have been thrown into a universe that offers us no legible account of its origins. It is like a mute amnesiac with no papers: we have to figure out for ourselves where she came from. We have discovered a lot about her physical constitution, including how unimaginably old she is, but we are still stumped about where she came from and why she is at all. So we start hypothesising. In many ways the most attractive response to the question is a reverent agnosticism. In spite of the extraordinary fact that in us the universe has started thinking about itself, and in spite of the equally extraordinary fact of human cleverness and rationality, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever be able to push back beyond that originating moment we call the Big Bang. We’ll have to settle for a state of unknowing about what came before – italicised because there was no ‘then’ at that point for anything to be before. Strictly speaking, agnosticism should not be described as a hypothesis, because it is not so much positing an answer to the question as learning to live without one. It encourages us to live gratefully with uncertainty and give thanks to we-know-not-wh
at for the gift of being. The risk run by those in this position is that it can lead to intellectual smugness at the expense of those who refuse to, or are incapable of, living with such uncertainty; and it opens itself to accusations of cowardice from the other two positions:
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.48
For those who insist on leaping, there are two options. The first is radical atheism, radical because it has the courage to dig up and burn the roots of belief in God that have grounded the culture and morality of the human community for centuries. For the real atheist, there is no one there and never has been, no one but us. It is from our minds that the idea of the universe has come, as well as the gods and moralities with which we have populated it. There is no author of our being, no giver of laws by which to live, other than the ones we ourselves have created. We are the author of the author, the ruler of the ruler. God is not dead, he never was. He is over, out of it, away. So we must turn away from ‘the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields’49 towards us. Now we are responsible for ourselves, so we should just get on with it. Bracing as that view is, I find it hard to understand how those who take it present it with the same insouciance with which they might observe that the number 23 bus has been cancelled. There is no sense from them of the momentousness of what has happened. Nietzsche understood.
Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?50
Leaving Alexandria Page 14
